Posted on 01/31/2010 in Ruby on Rails

The design on this site is somewhat dated, it's the same as last time, just a bit more polished than how I left it. When I was going back and trying to add CSS, it just felt unorganized and I saw room for some improvement. With that, I decided to re-write the CSS and I felt like using something I found a while back, Less CSS.

I have updated the site now with Less CSS, and it was a good experience to say the least. It's an interesting approach to CSS, and it felt a bit more natural to a programmer. It had functions, variables, and nested rules.

Posted on 01/30/2010 in Coding

This past week I migrated a production application over from a shared server, over to a dedicated server. I had to move over quite a bit of stuff, the database, thousands of images, permissions, etc. When you're used to moving small databases around, you usually don't run into too many problems other than a incomplete file or just something that takes 5 minutes to fix.

To see how I solved it and made it more likely for a migration to move smoothly the first time around, read this.

Posted on 01/29/2010 in Apple

This isn't about what I like so much about the iPad, but what I plan on doing with it. People are overlooking how this will actually benefit you.

I've made a few iPhone applications; one is off the store due to legal reasons (it was my fault, but damn you Sony Music), and the other one was lost in a harddrive crash (now I have Time Machine and git). They both were enjoyable experiences, and I learned a lot from them both.

I think the iPad is perfect for the kinds of applications that weren't really a fit on the iPhone in the first place. What could that be? Well, there are a few things.

Full screen picture gallery when it's on the Dock.

Alarm clock, this could be pretty slick.

Social games that you could only do between Bluetooth. What about a twister kind of game, were your fingers need to be tangled?

Some things just don't fit well on the iPhone's screen; Monopoly, Madden, Touchgrind, etc.

I don't want to bring my laptop to bed so I can watch a video, so I use my iPhone. Which is great and all, but it tends to feel dated watching a video on such a small screen when it was supposed to be viewed on a bigger screen. Although some will argue the iPad's aspect ratio is horribly flawed, unless you're some Blu-Ray 1080p loving 52" LED kind of guy, you'll live. This is the mentality that people need to bring when thinking of making apps for the iPad, making applications a more pleasurable experience on the iPad then it ever could be on the iPhone.

All the hardcore coders were expecting something targeted towards them, I don't really blame them, because I was hoping for a bit more as well. In the end I blame that solely on how hyped up this was going to be by all the blogs.